Please don’t make your iPad games portrait-only. It’s always much less comfortable to hold it that way. (Haven’t quite decided if magazines get a pass. For one thing, you don’t need to interact with them as much as with a game.)

19 October

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit that price point, it’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software,” Jobs said on Monday’s quarterly earnings conference call. ”As a software driven company we think about the software strategies first.”

“We know developers aren’t going to deal well with these different sizes and they have to change their software every time the screen size changes,” he added. “When we make decisions on 7-inch tablets it’s not about cost, it’s about the value of the product when you factor in the software.”

Hallelujah. I’m not just happy to see Jobs confirm all the points I’ve been making, I’m also quite pleased to see him call Apple “a software-driven company.” Some interpretations would have you think he doesn’t, or didn’t, always realize that it is and should be.

Nice, but not nearly enough. Same thing for the device — I’m sure the hardware quality is better than the first version, but it desperately needs to look newer.

Oh, and the videos are just horrible: the voiceover guy sounds like synthetic speech, and the hands are typing so slowly you can’t help but feel (wrongly, I know) that the Pre 2 is incredibly cumbersome to use.

It’s a nice night for getting drunk. Don’t you feel like getting drunk right now? I do. Let’s all get drunk together. (I have no alcohol. Help me.)

iLife ’11

You’ll forgive me for not devoting much time, or thought, to that cruel joke of a half hour in the keynote; I can’t be bothered to check but this must be the weakest iLife update since the suite was created, and those iMovie trailers are the most tasteless creation Apple ever presented. Can you believe that Steve managed to come back on stage right after that, and say “awesome”?

FaceTime

I’m quite surprised by the lack of a Windows version. Surely that must be in the works, they can’t expect FaceTime to be a differentiator that will actually sell MacBooks? (Or maybe the iPhone is indeed that powerful and they’re right to withhold it.)

MacOS X 10.7 Lion

We didn’t expect that. Only, we did. All of those functionalities have been rumored and analyst-ed at length before, and not because of leaks but because they’re obvious and simply make a maddening amount of sense for Apple. It’s just not at all what we, the Mac faithful, wanted to hear.

We don’t want a full-screen mode to become the default on most apps, but that’s always what made sense to the average user (how many of your relatives have vehemently protested the maximize button that didn’t maximize?). We don’t want an App Store that Apple has control over, but it also works for the user… and for developers (as long as there remains the option to distribute your app in other ways — which is somewhat unlikely to last forever). We don’t want a Launchpad because… well, because that’s fucking pathetic, it was in OS 9. (But, again, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t a good thing to bring it back.)

Emotionally, this feels like the end of the Mac. The earthquake that had been announced for years, promising to sink the entire country. But, rationally, it’s the only thing that could ever happen, and we could only hope to delay it.

And it’s not like anyone’s gonna force Mac Pro users to buy apps from the Mac App Store and display them full-screen on their 30-inch matte Cinema display. It’s just an added convenience for those switchers who bought a MacBook because they enjoyed their iOS device.

MacBook Air

No surprise whatsoever as far as the hardware goes (and it certainly is attractive), but I’m confused by the pricing. Even if that’s the price point at which they can sell it, I figured they ought to artificially raise the MacBook Air’s price so that the 128GB 13-inch model doesn’t end up at almost exactly the same amount as the 250GB 13-inch MacBook Pro. There were already too many options at this end of the line, but now it’s just ridiculous.

I thought Apple’s lineup was all about avoiding those paralyzing choices?

26 October

That’s sad. Why is nobody willing to bundle it with actual phone service, which could easily bring the subsidy up to something like $400? A 7-inch tablet as a phone would certainly not be a mainstream sell, but it would at least provide the Tab with a legitimate niche — instead of its identity as the smaller iPad that doesn’t run iPad apps yet costs just about the same as an iPad.

Adobe and RIM have announced availability today of an Air SDK targeting the PlayBook’s QNX-based platform with deep hardware integration.

That makes sense — what better way for RIM to come out of left field and introduce a modern, web-technology-based operating system than letting Adobe do the work for them? I have to say I feel silly for not having expected Adobe to enter the mobile OS race; it’s so perfectly obvious in retrospect, and Palm already proved that designing the system around HTML, JavaScript et al. is not an altogether absurd concept.

Performance looks surprisingly good on that video of a (supposed) real prototype, so I’m assuming it’s the battery life that will be ridiculous instead.

27 October

The NOOKcolor features a 7-inch backlit IPS display and capacitive touchscreen. It weighs in at just under a pound and comes with 8GB of built-in memory, which can be expanded up to 32GB with a microSD card. It also features a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and a micro-USB port. It also has built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Abandoning e-ink is a terrible idea for dedicated e-readers (although what can you do to exist on the market when you’re between the Kindle and the iPad? talk about a rock and a hard place), but this looks like a rather nice mini-tablet. At $250, it’s gonna be interesting once it’s rooted and you can install vanilla Android on it. (Although I’m not certain you’d be able to use the Android Market even if you did that — isn’t access restricted?)

Looking seriously undercooked — I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’d gotten used to the idea that Android could reasonably said to be catching up with iOS, and kinda expected Google TV to work better out of the box. Not that I don’t realize that this is more functional than the new Apple TV, but it’s more expensive, more cumbersome to use, and basically it’s just a poorly-designed computer for your TV. That’s been done to death already.

I can’t believe this thing includes neither a DVR, nor even a tuner. I realize that the early adopters of such a device already have a DVR and everything, and would be reluctant to pay for one again, but I find it just absurd to imagine that this thing relies on an IR blaster to control your cable tuner. And that they’re content to sell a device that lets you search for upcoming shows, but isn’t able to program them into your DVR itself. Who’s seriously going to shell out $300 for this?

Again, it’s early, but it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to use a pokey TV app when you likely have much faster smartphone and laptop apps sitting within arm’s reach.

And, if you’ve got an iPhone or iPad, using it to send video to your big screen is just a cheap Apple TV (and a November software update) away. I’ve suddenly got much more respect for AirPlay.